Why does my email signature say that I don’t use AI assistants?

The main reason I’ve felt the need to explicitly say that I don’t use AI assistants relates to other people’s attitudes towards these tools. I’ve noticed that people don’t value work that’s been made with the help of AI. Even if they only suspect it was made using AI, it quickly loses value in their eyes. 

If the work is high quality, people are more likely to be dismissive of it, suspecting that it could only be this good because AI was used. If the work is disappointing in some way, they will also question whether it’s because the person used AI. 

I have noticed that even people who use AI assistants themselves often make negative comments about other people’s work, if they believe AI was involved. 

I have my own reasons for not using AI assistants, but one thing I’ve come to feel after observing other people’s attitudes to AI is that I want people to know:

• If you think what I’ve sent you is good, it’s 100% my own work and thinking
• If you see a mistake, that’s my mistake

It would mainly be emails I’ve written to you and spreadsheets containing budget breakdowns. But basically, anything you get from me that is an email or document of some kind, I want you to know that I created that without assistance from AI tools. 

Sometimes I find myself in the position of reading / assessing applications and CVs. I also don’t use AI assistants to summarise information from those – I believe it is a disservice to the effort someone has put into an application not to read it fully myself (and I say this with full awareness that some people’s CVs and applications are being made with the help of AI assistants). 

A CV is by definition a summary of someone’s career and education. So I don’t think it is necessary to use an AI assistant to summarise a document which is already a summary.

I literally just don’t want to. It is my preference to go through the process of working things out myself, and to write and present information using my own words and in a way that makes sense for my brain. 

Whether it is a written explanation of how I plan to approach a piece of work, or the presentation of numbers or other information in a spreadsheet, I think I gain clarity on what I’m doing through the process of creating those things, so I don’t want assistance from an AI tool to do it. 

Additionally, at this point in time I don’t trust AI to get things right. For example, I find that AI summaries often contain inaccurate information. I can’t see why I would trust an AI tool to figure something out to a higher standard than I could myself, if I took the time to do my own research or thinking. 

When it comes to editing a piece of writing, for example, I don’t know why I would want an AI tool to make decisions about what is worth keeping and what is working, when I could make those judgments for myself (and probably learn something in the process). 

I do fundamentally just value the thinking and creativity of real people over these technologies. 

Lastly, not to sound like a grandpa, but I managed my whole life without AI assistants, so I don’t feel at all compelled to change that now. At this time, I can only really see downsides to doing so. But I want to assure you that this isn’t a knee jerk reaction, it’s something I have thought about a lot.

No! At this point, I don’t think that is really possible. In the course of my work as a mix engineer, there are various tools I use that have an element of AI in how they work. For example, one of the most widely used plugin suites for mix engineers, iZotope RX, has used machine learning for years. 

However, this isn’t the type of AI that thinks for you, or takes away the need to make subjective judgements – the tools help me get to a sonic output that I want to achieve, but I still have to use my human ears to judge the sound, and I have to learn to use the tool effectively. It’s not just a button you press that outputs a mixed programme. 

As a professional, I do have to keep up with the technology that will allow me to give clients work which sounds how they want and expect it to sound. 

With that said, I also think that it’s good to remember we’ve been making radio documentaries for a long time – before any of this technology existed – and while the final mixes of those programmes might have sounded different, they didn’t sound bad. Perfection in this context is subjective and, in my personal opinion, not desirable anyway.

I try not to be judgemental, and when I know other people use these tools I simply accept it because it is very normal at this point. 

But also… I think to some extent we are all judging each other in lots of ways all the time. Maybe we need to realise that making judgements is simply a natural part of the internal world of most humans, and what matters most is that we are open minded and kind. 

I don’t think it is necessary or realistic for us all to agree about everything. You don’t have to agree with my stance on AI assistants, and I am not sweating your choice to use them, if you do. I am also fully expecting my views on this to evolve over time, as I speak to more people about it and as the technology itself evolves. Maybe I will become less hardline, or maybe I’ll get even more passionately anti-AI. Let’s see! 

At the end of the day, I have created this entire page on my website partly because I’m worried about the lack of nuance in a single line in my email signature about using AI assistants. So to some extent, I am clearly afraid of being judged as being judgemental, and that’s how we got here in the first place. 

I honestly and truly love being a person.